Pegasus in Flight (Talent, Bk. 2) - Softcover

As director of the Jerhattan Parapsychic Center, telepath Rhyssa Owen coordinated the job assignments for psychically gifted Talents. And though she had her hands full dealing with the unreasonable demand for kinetics to work on the space platform that would be humankind's stepping-stone to the stars, she was always ready to welcome new Talents to the Center.
Feisty and streetwise, twelve-year-old Tirla used her extraordinary knack for languages to eke out a living in the Linear developments, where the poor struggled to make ends meet and children were conscripted or sold into menial work programs. Young Peter, paralyzed in a freak accident, hoped someday to get into space where zero gravity would enable him to function more easily. Both desperately needed help only other Talents could provide.
With the appearance in her life of one extraordinary man with no measurable Talent at all, Rhyssa suddenly found herself questioning everything she thought she knew about her people. And when two Talented children were discovered to have some very unusual -- and unexpected -- abilities, she realized that she would have to reassess the potential of all Talentkind...

Earth has reached its darkest moment. In subterranean warrens, the poor eke out precarious lives where jobs are scarce and children are sold for labor -- while on the surface, a privileged few enjoy lives of luxury. As the population surges and unrest spreads, a disaster of epic proportions seems inescapable. The only hope: a platform under construction in space from which starships will be launched to colonize distant planets. But the project is critically behind schedule.

In the midst of the chaos, Rhyssa Owen and her fellow Talents -- telepaths who read minds, kinetics who manipulate matter, and precogs to whom the future is an open book -- struggle to survive. Then two children are discovered whose extraordinary psychic gifts have the potential to avert the looming catastrophe -- or hasten its ominous arrival...